"Bits of paper like your birth certificate. All registered names are Crown copyright … We are all taught to be a name, the name on our birth certificate. But if you don't consent to be that 'person', you step outside the system."

That's wrong, of course; but I won't attempt to counter any of his legal claims. That's already been done by the lawyer and blogger Legal Bizzle and I think most people, like commenters Awooga and MsRobinson immediately realise they're rubbish. You certainly don't need to be a lawyer to see through them. I am interested in the nature of the small, eccentric "freeman on the land" movement that dom's thinking represents, though, and want more people to be aware of it.

If you visit a few "freeman" websites, you'll see it's a sort of cod legalism some people in America and here claim can be used to get out of paying debts and taxes. "Freemen" like to think you can opt out of modern legislation by sending an affidavit to the Queen. They make nostalgic appeals to a particular notion of the common law, and see officialdom as having no lawful power – at least unless some oath or form of words is sworn so as to establish jurisdiction. They purport to resist the rule of law using parodies of legal documentation, or by insisting that the actions of others are lawful only if blessed by particular forms of words.

The love freemen show for magic texts, incantations and ritual is not just funny: it shows a strange, childlike respect for the trappings of justice, and a commitment to jargon not even the stuffiest solicitor can match. This thinking is to law as crystal healing is to medicine and, like fake healing, it's not as harmless as first appears.

The "freemen on the land" meme isn't just dangerous: it's politically unattractive, too. Freemen's love of common law seems romantic at first, until you realise it implies a wish to turn back the clock to a time before democratic legislation, a time when some people really were lucky to be free and when others really were enslaved.

I can understand that protesters at St Paul's may prefer simply to resist eviction rather than negotiate with the highways authority, the City of London. That's a choice they may make with their eyes open, having been properly advised by lawyers. Laws can be unjust, and nonviolent civil disobedience is sometimes a fair method of protest.

But law is the friend of political progress, not its enemy. Making companies and rich individuals pay their share will depend on exactly those legal and enforcement mechanisms that freemen seek to undermine, and on the rule of law that they mock. Freemanism stands implicitly against social progress, for a libertarian world is one where everyone's a law unto himself and where the state has no right and no role. We need to be aware of this nonsense so as to resist it.